I tried reinstalling several versions of the drivers and firmware until I finally realized the problem was that hotplug was replaced by udev when I installed Gnome (I guess one is supposed to read the list of packages that are going to be replaced before saying YES).

I know nothing about udev, but I could see it was complaining about the filesystems not being mounted at boot up. Sure enough I see in my /etc/rcS.d the start up scripts in the following order: